Sorceress Alive! ~the World's End Fallen Star~ (ソーサレス＊アライヴ! ～the World's End Fallen Star～) Review

The not-exactly-famous eroge developer LASS died for good in May 2018. Company president 剣技マナ said that after May 1st all business was transferred to DMM, and LASS’s main scenario writer LEGIOん went along to DMM too, getting involved in the development of a new title.

Then in the second half of the year, a new company, Fluorite, showed up — and with it, a new game: ソーサレス＊アライヴ! ～the World’s End Fallen Star～. In the credits list, we saw some familiar names: LEGIOん, and another familiar artist, 早川ハルイ.

Speaking of this “LEGIOん”, I actually had some interaction with him. His life didn’t seem to be going well. After LASS went under, he gave off a real drifting-along-with-the-current vibe — company gone, his mother passed away too, living like some ant-tier wage slave. I even hit him up on Twitter hoping he’d stay strong, and he actually replied to me. But what shocked me was……

He actually knows Chinese!

And the scarier part: he seems to have been following my Twitter for a while now… which means all those days I’ve been up there shit-talking, calling this developer a dumbass, calling that scenario writer a dumbass—he probably understood every word of it.

So when ソーサレス＊アライヴ! came out, I immediately went and shitposted about it on X (Twitter). For one thing, letting the producer find out I was playing a pirated copy would’ve been awkward. For another, telling the producer to his face that his game is garbage… that’s just rude, man.

So is this game actually shit or not?

At least that’s how it seemed from the trial version.

The premise is about as cliché as it gets: the protagonist is a high schooler who’s hooked on mobile games, and one day a shooting star falls out of the sky, slams into the Earth, and everything goes white in front of him. When he comes to, he’s somehow in another world — one with swords, magic, and high-tech gadgets all mixed together. The heroines all look like they line up with his old high school classmates, just with different names. In this world women hold absurdly high status, and the protagonist, being a male with magic, is basically a walking stud — every girl wants to get in good with him, every woman wants to get with him…

The protagonist arrives at a school in another world and finds out it runs some kind of PVP sport. 4v4, like Overwatch meets Sangokushi Eiyuuden — three squad members plus one Leader. Once the fight starts, the members can respawn infinitely, but if the Leader goes down, that’s a loss.

The problem isn’t here, it’s… this… this plot looks familiar no matter how you slice it…

This is literally the standard Japanese light novel toilet paper formula!

And the story here doesn’t just look formulaic—it looks like the especially boring kind of formulaic. Honestly, it’s already 2019. Being able to write a game this boring is a skill in itself. I watched for a bit and couldn’t take it anymore, wanted to Ctrl through it. As I held Ctrl, I couldn’t help but sigh: this game is at least sponsored by DMM, so it clearly isn’t short on money. Why take that money and make this shit? Is there really anyone who’d keep watching?

As it turns out, I really fucking couldn’t stand it!

The heroine routes in this game are ridiculously formulaic. You just pick affection choices during normal scenes, then midway through the protagonist gets sick and whichever heroine has the highest affection comes to check on him — and they all say the exact same lines. Last part is the tournament: the protagonist gets close to some heroine, discovers she has a problem, helps her solve it, then they bang. After that the protagonist, as coach, beats the school’s other powerhouse team (called Riri——Riririririririri) and the game just ends. Not even an ED…

The character routes aren’t exactly devoid of substance… though what they mainly do is introduce the concept of the “witch.” A few of the heroines are " witches’ cast-offs," children abandoned by witches. They’ve got horns on their heads too, and for that they get mocked by the other students, looked down on and sneered at by the game’s aristocrats. The protagonist, for his part, helps them each find themselves or whatever.

So after you finish all four heroine routes, an ALIVE route unlocks — and that’s where the game takes a massive turn.

On the ALIVE route, the protagonist leads the team of heroines onward through the tournament, and they finally make it to the grand final. The nation’s queen herself shows up to watch the match — and right then, something goes wrong at the arena.

A mysterious group of people starts a riot, and two of the female squad members in the protagonist’s team straight-up defect. Both of them are “Witches’ Spawn” (魔女の落とし子) — the kind of people discovered in the earlier character routes, the ones with horns on their heads.

During the rebellion, the queen actually gets killed, and the protagonist and the other female classmates get thrown into prison too. They only get out later when the academy headmaster rescues them.

After that the protagonist is just baffled — why did his perfectly normal school life suddenly get caught up in a coup? The game then explains the why through several worldlines. Turns out that besides the normal royal family, this country also has the 魔女の落とし子 (children abandoned by witches), and the royals have always treated the latter as lowly beings, even using them as test subjects for magic research. That sparked hatred between the two sides, and the 魔女の落とし子 want revenge too, so they sent a few students in undercover to wait for a chance to assassinate the queen — which is how this whole coup ended up happening.

The coup only led to a bigger conflict, and both sides started doing things worse than war — you wipe out my whole family, I wipe out yours, that kind of thing. In the end the protagonist tried to call for peace, but that didn’t work either. He just got killed instead.

But after the protagonist gets killed, the game doesn’t end. He’s back at the place where he first got isekai’d… and the whole isekai starts over again.

Later the protagonist goes through the same event several more times, and the tragic outcome still doesn’t change. The funny thing is, after he dies each time, he always ends up back at the place where he first got isekai’d.

After looping a few more times like this, a rock that claims to be Load finally shows up, bringing the headmistress along and saying it’s going to tell the protagonist the truth.

After the bullshit stone’s little explanation, the protagonist finally gets how this world works.

So it turns out the protagonist getting hit by a meteorite at school in the beginning was actually 800 years ago. When that meteorite hit Earth, it brought along a “Mother Stone,” and every human who touched the Mother Stone turned into a zombie. The stone also messes with people’s minds, and the planet basically became Resident Evil. Weirdly though, the Mother Stone doesn’t seem to have much effect on women—if anything, women can apparently harness its power.

后来，这块母石的力量被地球研究开发出来，它的碎片被人类加以利用，研究出了魔法力量。自然，能使用魔法的几乎都是女性，人类社会也实现了从“科技”到“魔法”的转变。

When the protagonist gets hit by a rock and wakes up, it’s not a trip through time—he’s been reincarnated into a world 800 years in the future. Thanks to a fragment of that mother stone, the bonds and relationships between reincarnated people are preserved across generation after generation for as long as the fragment exists. That’s also why, when he wakes up 800 years later and looks at the people around him, they still look like the same few classmates from 800 years ago.

The mother stone that crashed into Earth obviously didn’t come to hand humanity the gift of magic out of kindness—it came to rule the planet. And because the mother stone exists, so do those 魔女の落とし子, possessed and controlled by it. War between the two sides is unavoidable. No matter how things change, as long as the mother stone remains, the odds that Earth ends up destroyed by that war only keep climbing.

Road also explains to the protagonist that what he calls a death Loop isn’t a Loop at all—it’s his ability to see “future possibilities.” In reality, history hasn’t moved forward yet, and there’s still room to change things. Taking out the mother stone ASAP and saving the world is the way to go.

Just then, a female side character next to the protagonist pops up out of nowhere, announces that she’s actually the “mother stone’s” proxy, fully possessed by it and under its control…

Basically, it’s her coming out and going “come on, come on, I’m the boss, come get me.”

And so the final ending is naturally this “mother stone” getting crushed to death…

And then… I have no idea.

Why? Because the game uses DMM Player encryption and the crack is currently broken — after you beat the boss, the game gets stuck in an endless loop before the final epilogue, so you never get to see the true ending.

Also, because the crack wasn’t fully working, a lot of stuff in the ALIVE chapter seems to display incompletely. I’m also not too clear on the details of the protagonist recovering the “mother stone” and continuing his research.

That said, I’ve basically got a handle on what this game is going for by now, and it’s way too similar to a few things I’ve played before, so I’m not gonna bother chasing the final END. After all, this really is just a spiritual successor to LASS.

Why do I say that?

The setup where the protagonist keeps dying and then gets sent back to the day before his death gives off a real 3Days vibe.

那个所谓的“母石”、母石碎片赋予人特殊能力、最后打倒活了数百年不死的母石本身——这套设定完全就是 11eyes 的翠玉碑嘛！

At the end, the Mother Stone says to the protagonist, “Come on, my love, fuck me to death” — that’s the exact same trick as the immortal witch in 11eyes going “Come on, Vrald, hurry up and fuck me to death.”

And this CG too — even more familiar now.

As for the protagonist getting yanked out of his everyday life into another world right at the start, that’s the same shtick as 11eyes.

The only thing that really stands out is that “light novel toilet paper” Part in the first half — I had no idea what it was even trying to do. If the point was to build suspense for the second half, then were those four incoherent character routes just there to drive players away? I don’t think anyone could sit through all four, and looking at this game you’d never guess the latter half would have content that’s actually “pretty decent.”

Honestly, the overall concept of this game is pretty solid. At first it makes you think the protagonist has been isekai’d, but in the end that’s not what happens at all — instead it gives a story that looked like an isekai a proper explanation, and it even exceeds expectations. The foreshadowing pays off about as cleanly as you could ask for. Even if the final stretch felt completely familiar to me as a LASS fan, nobody these days has probably played 11eyes, so for them it might still feel fresh.

Even though plenty of Japanese players who stuck it out to the second part gave this game high scores, I still think it has quite a few flaws:

1. First off, the battle scenes just don’t have enough punch. I don’t know if Deep One spoiled me, but these half-assed battle CGs make my Dio ache every time, and the heroines’ awkward-as-hell stances in every fight really kill the mood.
2. Second, the game just doesn’t have enough CGs. Most of the time a fight scene needs a cool standoff CG, some genuinely hot-blooded text, and a hype BGM… and this game flops on all of those…
3. Last is the part everyone already knows: the first half is pointless and drags on forever. I don’t think the game is actually that long overall, but the garbage-tier first half makes it feel absurdly boring and endless. I don’t know if that was intentional, but… even if you’re trying to parody light novel readers, please know when to stop.

All that said, the fact that this game turned out way better than expected is pretty much undeniable — when the demo dropped, everyone was calling it shit, and now most of those same people are going “okay fine, this is actually good.”

I don’t think it’s shit either, but it’s still a fair way off from “oh damn, this is actually good.” At the very least, compared to the 11eyes I remember, it’s still a few hundred years behind.

People say things in your memory come with a beautifying filter built in. Maybe. Hopefully LASS’s next spiritual successor keeps getting better — though I do wonder which game’s plot they’ll copy wholesale next time. Shoujo Tengoku (少女天獄), maybe?